VMware integrates Pivotal containers

Sep 13, 2017

Kathy Gibson at VMworld in Barcelona— Since it was spun out of VMware, Pivotal has brought modern development tools to the production environments of the some of the world’s biggest companies.
“We have become developer-ready,” says James Watters, senior vice-president of Pivotal.
“Customers are all facing the same challenges,” he says. “They are all trying to figure out how to make all this stuff work. Tech is going everywhere, every company is becoming a software company, and we have to help them do this.”
Pivotal helps developers with developer-ready infrastructure. “Developers need to know the infrastructure is ready for their systems; they need that continuous delivery mechanism.”
The Pivotal Container Services (PKS) platform is a partnership announced by Pivotal and VMware that focuses on making Kubernetes APIs constantly available in vSphere.
“This is the last mile,” says Watters. “Without robust virtual machine management you can’t deliver container development.”
PKS will ship as a standalone product able to integrate with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and VMware’s software-defined data centre (SDDC) infrastructure.
The new offering is essentially the commercial release of open source Kubo technology and is designed to help operations teams deliver a hardened, maintainable container platform, while giving developers on-demand access to a production-ready environment featuring high availability, security, and multi-tenancy across private and public clouds.
PKS follows from Kubo, the joint engineering effort from Pivotal and Google Cloud announced in November 2016.
Kubo aims to bring the multi-cloud deployment capabilities of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (via BOSH) to Kubernetes clusters, thus providing a uniform way to instantiate, deploy, and manage highly-available Kubernetes clusters on any cloud.
Now VMware has joined this team, and is committing significant R&D resources to jointly develop Kubo and build solutions on top of it that enhance the operational readiness of Kubernetes.
The initial release of PKS will feature Kubernetes via BOSH, VMware NSX, and a jointly developed version of Open Services Broker API that allows easy integration of GCP services into PKS applications.
PKS will feature cross-cloud security and network connectivity including container network interface (CNI) compatible services powered by NSX. PKS will be seamlessly integrated with VMware vSphere, enabling customers to use VMware’s unified SDDC infrastructure for containers and virtual machines.
An important benefit for enterprise customers will be PKS’ constant compatibility to Google Container Engine (GKE), which is continuously powered by the latest Kubernetes release and features a fully managed experience backed by Google SRE (Site Reliability Engineering). PKS’ constant compatibility with GKE gives users the latest container-native innovations in a secure and consistent environment.
PKS customers will be able take advantage of deep integrations with VMware infrastructure and management offerings for:
* Enabling persistent storage for stateful applications via the vSphere Cloud Provider, which provides access to vSphere storage powered by VMware vSAN or traditional SAN and NAS storage.
* Automation and governance for enterprises via vRealize Automation and provisioning of service provider clouds with VMware vCloud Director.
* Monitoring and troubleshooting of virtual infrastructure via VMware vRealize Operations.
* Metrics monitoring of containerized applications via Wavefront by VMware.